Doug Van Gundy
Bless
I bless the ease with which language lets me be misunderstood. I have stumbled through my life with an armful of words and upon occasion, have dropped the wrong one in a place where it left a terrible stain in the living room of someone else’s life, and I own this utterly.
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For every bully who ever called me pussy, faggot, wimp, girl because I didn’t know sports, preferred reading books and seeing movies to killing animals with guns or reveling in the masculine intimacy of fist upon face, I place a gentle kiss upon each confused, furrowed brow. I humbly receive the gift of the remembered violence gladly.
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For my ex-wife, who hated my home, didn’t like my family and never wanted me to visit them, who I acquiesced to more often than not, who became physically ill whenever I wanted to go out to hear music or visit with friends, who kept me prisoner in her home with suicidal gestures and guilt and shame until she granted me a divorce because it was all my fault: I fall upon my knees until they are black-and-blue.
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Because self-knowledge can be a heavy and sorrowful thing, fraught with a terrible joy, I sing a little hymn of praise – join in if you know the words.
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For all of the unknowable persons in this world, and all of the things impossible to know about them, and for all of the ways that we are chained to the walls of our own skulls, watching dim projections of the outside world: I spill forth with unnamable gratitude.
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For the schizophrenic ex-husband of my dear friend, who thanked me for watching their teenage son (overnight, at the last minute, because no one else could or would), by threatening to kill me with the pistol in his glove box when he finally showed up nineteen hours late: I write his name with a Sharpie on each of a string of Tibetan flags, trusting the wind to remember him & pray for him, even when I cannot.
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As for myself, I will unload the pistol I have carried in my glove box since that morning, anointing it with oil and returning it to its rightful place in the hall closet.
I cannot see beyond this gesture. It will have to be enough.
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Doug Van Gundy teaches in both the BA and MFA writing programs at West Virginia Wesleyan College where he also directs the undergraduate Honors Program. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including The Oxford American, Ecotone, Appalachian Heritage, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is co-editor of the new anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia, and is currently working on a follow up to his debut poetry collection, A Life Above Water. Doug lives in Elkins, West Virginia, and plays fiddle, guitar, mandolin, and harmonica in the old-time string band, Born Old.
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